This post is a transcript of Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 78, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!

Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 78 – Full Transcript

Sandi was in the UK and just got back recently

Star Citizen News first: 2.1.1b has been pushed to PTU. It’s a test launch, making sure thing are stable. If the Universe doesn’t exploded, then 2.1.1 will go live very soon.

The Subscriber Vault has been updated with some Starfarer images.

On YouTube, there’s a cool video of Gillian Anderson talking about working on SQ42.

X-Files starts again this weekend! In celebration, they’re bringing the Xi’An Scout back on sale briefly! That’ll start today.

Ben’s week – Everyone’s been sick this week. They’ve been hopped up on cold medicine all week. Flu-filled week. Ben was off for a few days.

Jump Point Rerun this week was … something. They can’t remember. 10 for the Developers was good though, with Forrest and Eric Kieron Davis.

Because of all the Summits going on this week, many people from around the world from the studios are in LA right now. Pete Mackey, John Pritchett, and Calix Reneau in a segment next week on AtV talking about Flight Model and such.

They’re making ‘D’ jokes. There’s a ‘D’ behind them from the Clou’D’ Imperium sign from the old office. And they are sick and find it funny.

Sandi this week – last night she saw Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Apparently it was silly fun.

Almost finished the Saitek peripherals, getting them up online. Should be up next week.

More work has gone into the Collector’s box – it’s in final sampling. Sandi did some interviews for marketing people.

Sandi’s been dealing with the UK a lot, they have a new CS manager there. There’ll be an interview with him on AtV soon.

They’ve done some convention planning for DragonCon, GamesCom, and such as well.

There’ll be a show floor booth that’s a bit bigger at GamesCom

CIG will be at DragonCon this year.

Allie’s off sick cause she has the flu.

And now, Questions!

Breaking news from Alexis – There will be a Subscriber RtV next Wednesday with sean Tracey!

[Why is there a D behind you?] It’s the D from clou’D’ Imperium. They put in there. Justin’s giving Disco the D now.

Sandi doesn’t remember the D being that big.

Disco hid the D so no-one can touch it anymore.

[Updates on Cutlass?] Filming a segment for AtV soon, with someone who’s working on LoD’s for the Cutlass.

[Hull series?] No. They’re further in the future.

Caterpillar’s getting good work though, as is shte Xi’An Scout (in its final GreyBox stage). Sabre is really close.

LA office is still closed to tours till March at least.

[24 million $ stretch goal?] Shuttles? We’re watching Disco and Ben look up exactly what the stretch goal was, because who remembers them all really. It’s the public transportation system. It’s still coming to the game. It’s the system to travel from system to system without owning a ship. Saw some of it in the Genesis Starliner post.

Need to have multiple systems before there can be public transportation between then.

No price estimates on Prowler or the new Corvette yet.

The Office is in greybox right now. It’ll be hangar ready real soon. They might do an AtV segment to show some of the progress on the office off though.

[Update the SQ42 page as more behind the scenes things come out?] Yes. It will be happening. It’ll get added.

[Who picks the MVP’s?] They go around the room and ask mods as well, see what’s going on. Final call is usually on Disco, unless Ben really likes something.

[PTU patch today?] There’s a PTU patch right now, 2.1.1b. It’s a minor patch. Putting it on PTU to make sure it doesn’t break things, it’ll go live if it’s all good. Should be live by the end of the show.

No date for CitizenCon yet, but they’re looking at Sunday, October 9 right now. Saturday or Sunday, the 8th or 9th. They’ll know the day when they have the venue.

[High-level update on how SC goes from here?] Check out the two part interview with Tony Zurovec a few weeks ago. That’s about as high level as it gets. That and 10 for the Chairman. But they’re basically going to be expanding from the base they’ve built in Crusader. More missions, more ships, more systems, etc… Crusader is the center, things will keep being added to it.

Starfarer is not in the patch today. It’s just bug fixes. But the Starfarer is pretty close.

[Next formal livestream?] No announcements yet. They want big livestreams to be something special. Once they have a cool event they’ll build a livestream around it.

[Why isn’t the 890 jump being built right now?] They have 20 ships to work on, and staff to work on 4 at a time. The Jump is not a priority right now. It’s an assembly line, build one at a time, not all at once.

Things like Mining, Cargo, SQ42 ships, etc… are being prioritized over luxury ships.

Once the artists working on SQ42 ships are done, they’ll have a LOT more experienced people to throw onto other ships.

[Can we buy a starfarer next month?] Nothing to announce yet.

[Updates on Hotas’?] Should come online next week. The Hotas and keyboard will be first, later will be the headset and mouse. The high end Hotas should get an announcement around E3.

[Physical packages in the future?] Need to ship the promised ones first. Then they can go from there. Silver constellation collectors boxes will ship first, June or July. Then the Freelancer and Hornet boxes.

Expecting the PRE-ORDER for the Standard HOTAS next week. Not shipping, but pre-order.

[Update for the HUD on the Freelancer?] None of the HUDs are finished. It’s a generic HUD spread among the ships right now, the UK are working on bespoke huds for all the ships.

[BBC interview?] Sandi’s waiting to hear from the head of PR when that’ll air. She’ll post it when they know when it’ll air.

[Org 2.0?] Benoit from Turbulent was in LA this week. Disco has seen the mockup. It’s very cool; it will take some time, but it looks good.

Also the melt for store credit – they have a system they will try, they’ll have details about that next week.

[Preorders for HOTAS will be limited? Can people order more than one?] Sandi thinks you can, but she’ll double check. The box is large and heavy, but she’ll find out.

The first run is signed, limited run though, signed by Chris Roberts. Only sold on RSI. Later on, Saitek will sell it in stores and such, but those won’t have Chris’ signature.

For the first run, they’ll be 1 of 2000, 2 of 2000, etc…

[Updates on performance? Higher GPU, better CPU usage?] 2.1.1 should have some things to help with that. Some performance issues are bugs, like problems with the Connie, other performance enhancements come later in the process though.

[Plans for a UEE physical captains hat?] Disco just bought the patches and put them on a hat.

No updates on the lobby system yet. They’re very aware of it though.

[Plans for Paris Games Week?] No. It runs close to the end of October, really close to all the other stuff, so nothing planned.

[Links to web mini games to make them easier to find?] Yes. It’s a good idea, they’ll do that.

Lando is ignoring the ‘what happened to your hair’ question. He woke up in the middle of the night and was hot. So he got rid of it all.

Lando has trouble sleeping when it’s hot with long hair apparently.

Sandi – ‘Man buns are a thing?’

Herald is being worked on.

Next ships are likely to be Sabre, Xi’An Scout, the Starfarer, and the Reliant.

Getting a final materials pass done on the Reliant.

They’re figuring out how to get owners of the Gemini the regular Starfarer. They’ll figure something out.

Alexis vehemently denies ever suggesting Lando put his hair in a man-bun.[Morrow tour] It was shown in CitizenCon. There’s a version of it available on YouTube, but the people who were going to work on a cleaner version all have other things to work on.

Sandi has left.

Matt Sherman is here.

[Will the 890 jump be available again?] At some point, yes. They don’t put them up just to make money, they do it as events. When there is news, or something cool.

Just so people don’t overestimate what’s happening with the 890 Jump; when it was first unveiled, it was done with the original component spec. Since then, the components have changed, so it’s being updated for the new component system. It’s not fast tracked, it’s not coming out in the next few weeks, they’re just making sure it’s going to work because there’s a revision to the entire component and stat systems.

There’s no info about the Banu Merchantman right now.

Ben sat down with Sandi and Erin and such, talking about priorities on ships once SQ42 is done, and the BMM and Carrack are on the top of that list.

[Are Ben’s jokes getting better?] Disco says no. Ben says yes.

[New stuff for subscribers?] The January award just went out. Cool floating armour suit. It looks neat.

There was also a Vault update today, with Starfarer images.

The current plan for variants is to build all the base models first, then take that knowledge and apply it to the variants. Don’t expect to see variants until you see all the base models.

Over the Holiday livestream with the MISC ships; the more base ships get built, the more guidelines they have, so the more they can build faster. It’s all about learning how to build all the ships.

Part of the reason why there’s a lot of work on Aegis ships. They’ve got a complete toolkit, it’s very easy to get things like the Vanguard and Sabre out quickly.

The Xi’An Scout is available in store right now.

CCU’s for the Scout will come online shortly. It’s not going into the game, it’s still a concept sale, it’ll be in a 2.x patch, but they basically went ‘Gillian Anderson’ – ‘ X-Files’ – ‘ Alien Ship!’

Most of the Scouts core parts are locked in. It will be slightly beefier than the specs page shows. The shielding is going to be a hallmark of the ship, more so than any other ship in its size class. Shielding can take a punch, but not the hull.

[Vanguard?] This is the first iteration of the Vanguard. 2.1.1 makes some balance changes, and it, like all ships, will continue to be balanced over time.

For 2.1.1 it should have proper shield health.

The Scout is still a two seater.

[Cruise mode working as intended?] That’s a better question for Calix. Tune into AtV next week for an interview about flight modes. But it’s still a work in progress.

[See the health of a ship hull in AC?] You can see the regions of the ship discolour, but that’s it. That’s how that damage is represented. No health bars.

[Bind for each flight mode, rather than just a single mode change button?] That’s a long-standing contention. A big part of that is sorting out an action map – big list of what actions does the player need to take at a time. Something like that is something they’d explore, but they need the whole action list built out before they can decide what gets discrete and shared keybinds.

Regarding time duration of insurance – current plan is it’s based on play time, not real time. 6 months of real time – January to June, it’d be how many hours you’re putting into the game. You don’t get penalised for taking a break.

Also, insurance doesn’t matter. It’s not a way to punish anyone.

[Next landing zone after Nyx?] If you check out the Tony Zurovec interview, the next likely landing zone after Nyx is Hurston.

They found a cat in the alley yesterday.

[Will we be seeing an update to the PU login UI, a way to queue into a server?] by-and-by. Eventually. They’re working on it. Grouping is a priority. No release date yet though. Ben did have an email with Chris and Sandi on the weekend, that was a priority on it, so was character customization. And the guys in Germany already have character customization planned out.

The Vanguard currently has its own size 2 missile racks, which fit on an Avenger or a 325a. Can put 8 missiles on the 325. Those aren’t final racks though. They’ll be changed.

[How hard is it to deal with the component system going from 7 to 4 sizes?] The old system was worse. Matt worked a lot with Elwin getting size standards set so it can scale from small to giant size ships, the components are very scalable now.

[Why is the Freelancer missile lock so slow?] First flight-ready implementation. Lots of stuff are still being tuned. It’s just long-term balance. And this is the stock version of a freighter ship, the Freelancer. Eventually you’ll be able to customize components to fix things like missile lock time.

Every ship will have plenty of loadout options.

[Can we cut power to or overheat doors to disable them?] Matt would have to see the exact quote, lots of dev comments are just snippets of larger explanations. Needs more context. They haven’t seen what he’s talking about yet.

It’s like when Ben talks about how much he hates everyone who’s ever flown a Cutlass, and that’s all people latch onto.

Disco’s 70 year old father plays SC, and flies a Cutlass, and sends Disco screenshots all the time asking about things like the UI and when it’ll be better. Cutlass fans have an inside man.

Ben’s dad always asks if they’ve put up a new module.

Toast has been with CIG for a bit over a year. From the outside it’s possible to soak up everything the devs say. Devs though, 90% of the time, they only pay attention to what they’re working on. Toast has had a harder time keeping track of what’s going on since working on CIG.

Sneak Peek this week was the MISC Starfarer in greybox sitting in the new expanded Revel and York hanger. Screenshots were sent by Emre Switzer, who’s still working on the lighting. It’s a work in progress.

People commenting on its texturing and lighting, it’s still very much a WiP.

Ben ‘it’s why we put the I in wIp’

They’re talking about Melrose Place now.

And that wraps up this week’s RtV. Thanks for reading.

Be sure to tune in Wednesday for the subscribers RtV, with Sean Tracy.

Xi’An Scout is on sale right now. Check out the Gillian Anderson interview. Check out 2.1.1 live which should happen any minute. And that’s all. Finger-guns!